NetworkManager 0.7 is the new Chuck Norris

It will cure cancer. It can divide by zero. It can touch M.C. Hammer. And it’ll make your life better too. Why?

Drivers Suck Less

Drivers were (and still are) the largest reason for NM flakiness. But today, they are more consistent in their support of Linux Wireless Extensions, the standard ioctl-based method of talking to wireless drivers. NetworkManager directly caused the addition of WEXT-based WPA support to Madwifi, ndiswrapper, and linux-wlan-ng. And mac80211, the new kernel 802.11 wireless stack, will provide a consistency of driver operation unseen yet in Linux. That rocks, since we’ll have one place to fix the behavior instead of 6 or 7. It just keeps getting better, even though it’s taken a while to get here. I put together a list of driver problems waaay back in 2005. People cared. Drivers got fixed.

More Bars in More Places

The biggest reason why NM 0.6.x couldn’t support some device types or WPA authentication methods was that the configuration D-Bus API wasn’t flexible enough. The config framework has been completely rewritten. It’s more flexible, better engineered, and quite a bit easier to understand. We’ll support GSM/GPRS/EDGE/UMTS/HDSPA/HSUPA and 1xRTT/EVDO-r0/EVDO-rA broadband cards via better PPP integration, which also means dialup and possibly ISDN/PPPoE/PPPoATM support too. Bluetooth DUN and PAN will be possible now too.

You’re not in Soviet Russia

The network doesn’t control you. It’s the other way ’round. A major goal of 0.7 is widening the usefulness of NetworkManager. Through static IP support (including multiple IP addresses), you could use NM on your server or stationary desktop machine if you wish. You don’t need to use DHCP. You can override specific pieces of DHCP-provided configuration (like search domains). You can set up multiple connections for a device, with static IPs when you’re at work and DHCP when you’re at home. You’ll be able to have more than one device active at one time, and share an internet connection between them. For once you’ll be able to easily share that $9.99/hr hotel WiFi connection with your friends over ethernet, or an ethernet connection with your friends over WiFi.

Your Mom is NetworkManager’s Other Ride

With NetworkManager, she won’t have to care about how she connects to the Internet to check her email or sell her stuff on Ebay when she uses Linux. Wherever she happens to be tonight. Even though 0.7 will have awesome new capabilities that you and your mom will love longtime, it will still have the same easy simplicity of use you’ve come to expect from stuff that Just Works. We’re going to keep the GNOME applet simple up-front, and punt the really nasty configuration complexity to an out-of-band connection properties tool. So you won’t have to see configuration options that 95% of people don’t have to touch anyway.

On the Technical Side

There’s been a lot of code churn. Driving wpa_supplicant via D-Bus makes everything incredibly robust and allowed us to drop threads completely. Dropping the dep on dhcdbd makes DHCP work so much better (thanks to Robert Frank for the initial patch). Tambet Ingo showed the internal structure who was boss (hint: he was), and reworked the D-Bus API adding much-needed sanity and introspection support. The configuration D-Bus interface is based on dicts, allowing a lot of future flexibility.

Christmas in October?

Probably not; Fedora 8 has been the driving force for 0.7 so far, and we’ll get something quite usable in F8 even if it’s not feature-complete enough to call 0.7.0. The first focus is feature parity with 0.6.5, then multiple active device support, and then we’ll unleash 0.7.0 upon the world.